Maggie Scarf is a former visiting fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, and a current fellow of Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University. She was for many years a contributing editor to the New Republic and a member of the advisory board of the American Psychiatric Press.
After examining women's choices in Unfinished Business (LJ 10/1/80) and marriage in Intimate Partners (LJ 2/15/87), Scarf investigates communication within the nuclear family, focusing on how families develop intimacy, manage power, and resolve conflict. She uses in-depth studies of four families exemplifying categories of the Beavers Family Systems Model: dysfunctional, tyrannical, rule bound, and average/optimal. Scarf demonstrates, for instance, how dysfunctional patterns of behavior develop and are acted out through such mechanisms as bulimia and alcoholism, how these patterns may be repeated in future generations, and how they can be changed. Especially informative are sections reporting research on the mother-bonding in child development and techniques of family therapy designed to clarify boundaries in relationships. Recommended for psychology collections in public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/95.]‘Lucille Boone, San Jose P.L., Cal.
How families shape each member's expectations, patterns of emotional reactivity, self-acceptance or self-hatred is the theme of Scarf's enlightening report. Combining interpretive analysis and case studies, and distilling a large body of research and clinical experience, the book should be as popular as her bestselling studies of marriage (Intimate Partners) and women and depression (Unfinished Business). Scarf found that many families are gripped by unconscious fantasies, unquestioned assumptions that result in the playing out of old agendas derived from parents' own pasts. She explores the maladaptive strategies that many families employ, such as scapegoating (sacrificing one family member to keep the family's operating system intact) and emotional triangling, an evasive maneuver to deflate escalating tensions in a two-way relationship. Scarf identifies five types of families, ranging from severely disturbed to polarized to optimal, and she organizes her material around this framework, a scale that was devised by psychiatrist W. Robert Beavers in the mid-1970s. Special attention is paid to the effects on a family of alcoholism, eating disorders, incest and sexual infidelity. Included are ``tasks,'' or therapeutic exercises, designed to strengthen familial bonds. This is a resource for families trying to improve communication, to deal with anger, frustration, ambivalence. Author tour. (Oct.)
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
